Summary

  • BSCPLC reports a two-station submarine-cable business, not control of every international connection. Its annual report acknowledges terrestrial competition and distinguishes designed, lit and achievable capacity.
  • Published capacity claims come from different dates and describe different things. Spare capacity on one route and a forecast for a new cable do not establish what a customer can use today.

More than 95% of BSCPLC's domestic SEA-ME-WE-5 traffic went east, towards Singapore, according to its FY2024-25 annual report. Elsewhere in the same account, the company describes substantial unused capacity going west, from Sri Lanka towards France and Italy. It had leased some of those westbound holdings to international operators in earlier years.

Here is the difficulty with asking whether Bangladesh has enough bandwidth: a spare connection to one destination does not, by itself, supply a customer trying to reach another. Before the arithmetic comes the route.

The annual report's managing director statement, printed pages 9–10, makes that distinction more clearly than the earlier version of this article did. These are the operator's statements, not independent measurements of today's traffic. But they are public, specific and useful.

Two landing stations, more than one kind of capacity

Bangladesh Submarine Cables PLC, or BSCPLC, connects Bangladesh to international submarine systems. Its report identifies stations at Cox's Bazar and Kuakata. The history is not blank: it describes taking over SEA-ME-WE-4 participation in 2008, joining the SEA-ME-WE-5 consortium in 2014, and the commercial inauguration of the second submarine-cable connection on 10 September 2017.

The capacity figures need their labels. In the FY2024-25 report, BSCPLC puts its SEA-ME-WE-5 design capacity at 2,570 Gbps and its lit capacity at 2,200 Gbps. The latter is capacity equipped for service, not a measurement of how much traffic customers were sending. The report divides it into 2,100 Gbps towards Singapore and 100 Gbps towards France.

For SEA-ME-WE-4, it gives approximately 4,650 Gbps as the ultimate achievable capacity after an upgrade. Add that to SEA-ME-WE-5's design figure and the report's combined achievable total is about 7,220 Gbps. Add it to the smaller lit figure and the answer changes. Neither calculation is a live traffic reading.

This is why a national headline total cannot settle a local purchasing question. The customer needs capacity on a particular connection, delivered at an agreed point. A share of a cable consortium, equipment ready for service and bandwidth actually supplied are related, but they are not the same product.

The dates matter as much as the sums

The old article treated two newspaper accounts as versions of a single October 2026 statement. Their dates do not support that reading. The Daily Star's report was published on 18 October 2025. It reported 7,200 Gbps in total, with 4,200 in use and 3,000 available. Dhaka Tribune's account is dated 4 September 2026 and gives 4,000 supplied and 3,200 available against the same headline total.

A ministry statement dated 12 May 2026, published the next day, supplies another snapshot: roughly 4,100 Gbps provided and 3,100 more available. It separately gives SEA-ME-WE-5's lit capacity as 2,200 Gbps, of which 1,488 was used.

Those observations cannot simply be lined up as a clean utilisation trend. They have different dates, and the terms and component figures are not fully reconciled. Nor is there a basis for dismissing every difference as rounding. What they establish is what the operator was saying at those points, not a continuous, independently measured account of demand.

A large supplier is not the whole market

BSCPLC matters because it operates landing infrastructure and holds capacity in international cable systems. That does not mean every international connection passes through it. Its managing director explicitly describes competition from International Terrestrial Cable operators, pressure to revise tariffs and a market share of around 50% during the reporting period.

That is the company's account of competition, not an independently verified current market share. Even so, it contradicts the earlier article's portrayal of one firm controlling all international supply. Two landing stations under the same operator establish a shared commercial counterparty; they do not establish a statutory monopoly, identical physical routes or a proven price advantage over terrestrial alternatives.

The distinction also matters for resilience. Two coastal sites are observable assets. Whether a customer's service survives a fault depends on the connections beyond those sites and on the restoration arrangements purchased. This article has not tested a failover or examined a customer's contract.

The next cable is still a dated promise

The FY2024-25 report describes a SEA-ME-WE-6 route revision incorporating a terrestrial section through Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, with higher costs and delays. It then expected service in the final quarter of 2026. The May 2026 statement instead forecast early 2027 and about 30,000 Gbps of added capability; the September newspaper account reported a 2027 start and 34,000 Gbps.

These are dated forecasts, not certificates that the capacity is in service. The difference deserves a current explanation, not an invented one. A commissioning notice, equipped capacity on named routes and actual delivery would be more useful than choosing the largest forecast.

Bangladesh's capacity debate does not need fewer numbers. It needs numbers that keep their date, destination and meaning attached. Otherwise a customer looking for a working connection can be reassured by spare bandwidth that answers a different question.

Correction and update, 22 October 2026: We have corrected the newspaper dates and the claim that public documentation lacked landing history or capacity definitions. The operator's annual report supplies both. We have also withdrawn unsupported conclusions about a monopoly over all international connectivity, the relative cost of terrestrial alternatives and motives for excluding competitors. Future capacity remains identified as forecast, not operational supply.